Tech Tour Day Seven: Tech is central to CMU's mission When most people think of Central Michigan University, they think of a big liberal arts school in rural mid-Michigan with a strong teaching component. Well, they're right, but it's also a whole lot more. In six stops around Mt. Pleasant Monday, I learned that CMU is a global leader in several critical technologies and is deeply involved into bringing higher tech to driving, journalism and health care. More.
Covisint to set up health info exchange in Detroit area The Covisint subsidiary of Detroit-based Compuware Corp. has set up health information exchanges in several other sates. Now, it's coming home to Michigan. Compuware said Monday that Covisint had signed an agreement with several physician organizations across Southeast Michigan to electronically connect doctors to patient information via a single, secure framework. The electronic exchange will be called My One Health Information Exchange, abbreviated my1HIE, pronounced my-one-he. It will connect several thousand physicians treating the majority of Southeast. Michigan’s five million residents. More.
Meijer launches 'grocery by the case' online shopping, free delivery
Meijer shoppers can now add something new to their carts when browsing the retailer's Web site: Groceries. A year after unveiling its e-commerce site, Meijer will now begin offering grocery and dry good items bought in bulk from www.meijer.com. Now open for business, the new Grocery By The Case program will feature more than 2,000 products available for purchase. Meijer estimates that shoppers will save at least 5 percent when buying items by the case as opposed to purchasing them individually. More.
Cielo MedSolutions partners with physician group
Ann Arbor-based Cielo MedSolutions, a developer of health care software and Web applications, Monday announced a "preferred business affiliate" agreement with TrransforMed LLC, a subsidiary of the American Academy of Family Physicians. TransforMed provides practical support and consulting services to primary care physicians and health systems that want to transform their medical practices into "Patient-Centered Medical Homes." The TransforMed Medical Home model combines the relationship-centered values of primary care with new technologies to improve quality of care and efficiency, as well as patient and physician satisfaction. More.
Perrigo acquires Mexican drug manufacturer
Allegan-based Perrigo Co. announced Monday that it has acquired Laboratorios Diba, S.A. for approximately $25 million in cash. Based in Guadalajara, Mexico, privately-held Laboratorios Diba is a store brand manufacturer of over-the-counter and prescription pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics, hormonals and opthalmics. The acquisition is expected to add nearly $15 million of annual sales. More.
Kettering to offer students a chance to rocket to the top Flint's Kettering University has added a new aerospace engineering concentration to its mechanical engineering major. The new specialty trains engineers in unique areas of propulsion and aerodynamics using technological resources and software that are usually unavailable at other institutions for undergraduate students. Studies predict a looming shortage of aerospace engineers as the Baby Boom members retire. This program is primarily aimed at entering freshmen and sophomore students with the first course offering to occur in the summer of 2009. More.
Ford safety features: parental speed control, collision warning
Ford Motor Co. is introducing an innovative new technology -- called MyKey -- designed to help parents encourage their teen-agers to drive safer and more fuel efficiently, and increase safety-belt usage. Ford also announced it will offer a new advanced "active" collision-avoidance technology, Collision Warning with Brake Support, on certain Ford and Lincoln vehicles next year Ford's MyKey feature -- which debuts next year as standard equipment on the 2010 Ford Focus and will quickly become standard on many other Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models -- allows owners to program a key that can limit the vehicle's top speed and audio volume. MyKey also encourages safety-belt usage, provides earlier low-fuel warnings and can be programmed to sound chimes at 45, 55 and 65 miles per hour. More.
ANXeBusiness Corp. completes VPN acquisition Southfield-based ANXeBusiness Corp., a provider of networking and security managed services and software, has acquired certain assets of CSCI Inc., including the Virtual Private Network portion of CSCI's OfficeScreen business.
This is the company's second acquisition this year and is designed to strengthen the ANX VPN product line for customers in multiple vertical markets. More.
Ronia Kruse is Co-founder, President, and CEO of OpTech, LLC, in Detroit. OpTech provides IT staffing and e-business services, application maintenance outsourcing, and enterprise resource planning. Kruse has more than 12 years of experience in business, tax, and IT consulting, servicing clients such as General Motors Corp., Textron, and DTE Energy. She founded the company in 1999 and has grown it to a $12 million business. She is active in public policy for procurement opportunities for businesses owned by women. Previously, Kruse was a consultant for Deloitte & Touche and what is now PricewaterhouseCoopers. She also served as an adjunct professor for Wayne State University. She received the 2007 diversity champion award from the National Association of Women Business Owners Greater Detroit Chapter. In addition, Inc. magazine ranked OpTech 915th on its list of 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in 2007 after the company reported three-year sales growth of 382 percent. Read more.
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Research spending at the University of Michigan reached $875.8 million in 2007-08, an all-time high and a 6.4 percent increase over the previous year.
The federal government provided 69.8 percent of the funds. But while the federal commitment edged up 2.7 percent last year, industry sponsorships surged 11 percent, following a nearly 15 percent jump the previous fiscal year.
Those numbers suggest that UM's drive to forge stronger ties with industry -- and to help resuscitate the Michigan economy -- is finally bearing fruit, said Stephen Forrest, vice president for research.
"I think we're seeing the start of a trend, a hint that things are moving in the right direction," said Forrest, who cautioned against trying to draw too many conclusions from two years of data. "What we can say with confidence is that this effort to strengthen ties with industry has been a steady push for several years now, and the word is out that we strongly support this from the highest levels of the university. And it's finally starting to take hold."
UM consistently ranks among the nation's top five research universities, based on R&D expenditure statistics compiled by the National Science Foundation. But Forrest believes that continued growth of the UM's world-class research enterprise will require what he calls "a new funding model."
Federal research funding is likely to stagnate in coming years, so the university must rely more heavily on partnerships with businesses, industry and foundations, he said.
By strengthening ties with the private sector, the University can secure its own future while helping Michigan move from a manufacturing-based to a knowledge-based economy.
"It's our responsibility to participate in the growth of the new economy, simply because we can," he said. "We have the essential expertise, so we're well-positioned to help make it happen."
One example of a thriving industrial partnership is the Ford-UM Innovation Alliance, launched as a $2 million endeavor in 2006.
The Alliance teams more than a dozen UM faculty members with some 20 Ford Motor Co. scientists and engineers to develop a host of new technologies -- in-vehicle Web-based services, new collision-avoidance systems, and techniques to improve hybrid vehicle mileage, for example.
Because the level of cooperation and the "breadth of expertise" at UM exceeded Ford's expectations, the Innovation Alliance has blossomed into a $5 million effort, said Ed Krause, Ford's external alliances manager.
Note: Today's Blue Box was sponsored by Dewpoint. For information on how you can sponsor content in the Blue Box, contact Dan Keelan at (248) 455-7380 or dkeelan@cbs.com.
THE WORLD IN TECH
SAP says business turmoil hurting its revenue Shares of SAP AG plunged Monday after the business software maker said it saw a sudden drop in business at the end of September as global financial turmoil escalated. "The market developments of the past several weeks have been dramatic and worrying to many businesses," Henning Kagermann, the co-chief executive of the company, said in a statement. "These concerns triggered a very sudden and unexpected drop in business activity at the end of the quarter," he added. "Unfortunately, SAP was not immune from the economic and financial crisis that has enveloped the markets in the second half of September, causing us to report numbers below our expectations." SAP said it expects software and software-related service revenues for the July-September period to come in between 1.97 billion and 1.98 billion euros, or $2.66 billion to $2.67 billion. That is up about 13 percent from the third quarter of 2007, but SAP said in July it expected the figure to increase between 24 percent and 27 percent for the year. More.
Judge orders RealNetworks to pull down copying tool
RealNetworks Inc. said Monday it had temporarily stopped distributing its DVD copying software, RealDVD, at a federal judge's request in a copyright case brought by Hollywood studios."We temporarily suspended distribution of the product until tomorrow," said Seattle-based RealNetworks' spokesman Ryan Luckin. The site, made inactive Friday, now tells visitors: "Rest assured, we will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use." U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel is scheduled to take up the case Tuesday at 2 p.m. in San Francisco. More.
EBay cutting 1,600 jobs, 10 percent of work force
After a series of changes designed to draw more people to its online marketplace, eBay Inc.'s latest alteration is aimed at its own employees. The auction site operator said Monday it will cut about 1,600 jobs, 10 percent of its work force, in its largest round of dismissals ever. About 1,000 full-time employees will be gone, while eBay will achieve the rest of the cuts by letting temporary and part-time workers go and by leaving open positions unfilled. EBay would not describe which positions would be cut, other than to say they will come across the company and around the world. More.
Ask.com hopes to make search faster, more relevant
Assuming your company's name isn't a verb synonymous with looking things up online, how do you get Web surfers to not just try your search engine, but also frequent it? For Oakland, Calif.-based Ask.com, part of the answer may lie in improving the speed and relevance of search results. Ask believes it has taken steps in that direction as part of a new look it rolled out Monday. Ask, which is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, encountered the repeat-visitor problem after launching a version of its search engine dubbed "Ask 3D" in June 2007. With Ask 3D, the site moved away from the traditional method of showing search results as a long list and instead sorted them into three vertical panels, one of which included photos and other multimedia content related to users' queries. More.
Stocks: Indexes pare huge loss in volatile session; Nasdaq at four-year low
Technology stocks cut their losses in late trading Monday, but it wasn't enough to keep the sector from closing with wide declines amid a worldwide panic in financial markets that helped drive the tech-heavy Nasdaq down as much as 8% as investors dumped shares of companies that could be hit hard by a global recession. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index ($COMPQ) fell 84.43 points or 4.3 percent to 1,862.96. The Morgan Stanley High Tech 35 Index (MSH) fell 20.95 or 2.5 percent to 411.35, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index ($SOX) fell 9.97 points or 3.5 percent to 274.77. The Amex Pharmaceutical Index (DRG) fell 11.22 points or 3.9 percent to 278.31, while the Amex Biotechnology Index (BTK) fell 35.65 points or 4.9 percent to 698.55. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU) fell 369.88 points or 3.6 percent, to 9,955.5. The S&P 500 ($SPX) fell 42.34 points or 3.9 percent to 1,056.89.
Once again, tons of local extras, up to the GLITR 15-story limit: New diagnostic software from Nexiq; a UM prof who's a NASA science boss is looking forward to a flyby of a moon of Saturn; Azentek reports strong demand for its SmartMirror; Dow Corning releases a new electronics adhesive; Verizon puts up a new cell tower in Sterling Heights; and the federal bailout includes hybrid and electric vehicle credits. Elsewhere in Techland: the nation's top court stays out of a DVR patent fight; making sense of the tech meltdown on Wall Street; Microsoft Surface developer tools are due out this month; OneSite readies a mobile social notification tool, iPhone app; data breaches top their former record level of 2007; a small asteroid was to hit the Earth last night; an update on NASA's Messenger Mercury probe; data breaches top the record they set in 2007;
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When most people think of Central Michigan University, they think of a big liberal arts school in rural mid-Michigan with a strong teaching component. Well, they're right, but it's also a whole lot more. In six stops around Mt. Pleasant Monday, I learned that CMU is a global leader in several critical technologies and is deeply involved into bringing higher tech to driving, journalism and health care. 
